?? WORK and WORKPLACE REINVENTION CYCLE

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?? #WORK and #WORKPLACE #REINVENTION

??? In previous articles I have explained how the #retail sector is going full-cycle back to its local village origins, thanks to various #technology changes and latterly #eCommerce.

??? In parallel, the same is happening with #work, the #workplace, and how, where, and when work gets accomplished. The cycle began in the Rural Village setting, and we are returning to a very high-tech version of the same, as the #QAIMETA revolution unfolds.

??? Let me trace this cycle below. (Note: This is going to be somewhat a personal narrative, including some of my own direct life experiences across this cycle.)

?? RURAL VILLAGE LIFESTYLE

??? Back in the villages of agricultural society, most humans lived and worked at home 24/7/365, mainly on a small multi-generational #family #farm, and sometimes as a local shopkeeper family.

??? As you will see next, family farming in those days was a full #lifetime of #work, from one generation to the next, with small gains in technology advancement to help agriculture become more efficient and productive.

??? I grew up on such a small farm in northern England. Life was a daily chore, characterized by climatic seasons, and enabled by basic hand tools such as rakes, forks, and shovels.

??? My father inherited the farm from my grandfather and his father before that. He also inherited a horse drawn cart that was used to spread manure on the fields and to bring in the harvest.

??? But when the horse died, he was able to replace it and the cart with a converted ex-army jeep, that was like a modern-day pick-up truck and which, by the way, I learned to drive around the fields starting at age 10. My dad also paid a local blacksmith to arrange a simple gantry to go over the cab area, to keep off the rain on rainy days, and to enable us to carry more hay.

??? This farm was called a mixed farm, with a dozen milk cows, about 200 hens, and a couple of pigs. It was my job to collect the eggs daily, and to clean out the hen houses and the pigsty weekly.

??? I mention that operating a farm was seasonal because you had to mow the fields and bring in the hay harvest in the Autumn. Other farms had to plow and plant crops in spring. We did not have a tractor or hay mowing machine, but a neighboring farmer cut our crops in exchange for free milk and eggs from us for the year.

??? Our grandfather and his father had to cut the crops by hand using a scythe – all 13 acres of it. The cut grass was then raked into rows, not by a rowing machine but by using hand rakes. That’s all we had when I was a teenager. And once the hay was dry, it was loaded onto my dad’s jeep using a pitch fork, as shown in the image on the graphic.

??? Our hay was not bailed, because we did not have a machine for that either. We took it load by load into the barn, where it was piled up to the roof and had to be carefully managed to make sure it did not over-sweat and heat up to catch fire.

??? My dad milked the cows by hand (no machine), morning and evening. The milk was taken to our dairy room, attached to the farmhouse, where it was cooled and placed in milk churns. The churns were then taken to the nearby road for collection by a dairy truck each morning. My father was paid for this milk once a month, and that was our family’s main source of income. The same applied to almost every local farmer.

??? During the day, my father also had a gig job for extra income. He walked 20 minutes to a local textile mill (see below) and worked several hours during the day between milking times.

??? My mother and elder brother helped with general household chores, including lighting coal fires, baking, taking extra eggs to a local store for sale, shoveling winter snow, and so on.

??? We had little time for leisure other than playing dominos. We had no TV. Our life demanded a proficient integration of our work efforts, 24/7, all year long.

??? So that was the nature of work for most farming families in the agricultural era. One thing to remind everyone: the reason we have summer-time school holidays today is because during that era, all family members needed to be at home for #harvest time. So school shut down. Such was life.

?? VILLAGE/TOWN TEXTILE FACTORY

??? Life started to change when the industrial era started up and farms became more mechanized. I mentioned that my father also worked extra hours during the day at a nearby textile mill, which is the exact same one as shown in the photo here. (And the row of houses in the distance is where my grandparents retired.)

??? The mill had a few production lines of textile machines for weaving cloth or spinning thread onto reels. Each worker walked from home to the workplace, and then walked back and forth supervising a short row of machines. The owner of the mill and his family lived in the house that is attached directly to the Mill. So it was their full time job to keep it operating efficiently.

??? Normal working hours were 10 hours, 6 days a week, with usually a one week holiday break if it could be accommodated, So this provided gig jobs for village farmers such as my father, and boosted their incomes. It also provided more work-form-home handloom weavers who produced pieces of cloth. That is the origin of the term “piece work”. In fact, the very last handloom weaver in all of England was an ancestor of mine called Timmy Feather (you can find him on Google).

??? Some people worked in the textile mills full-time of course. The mills became more advanced, replacing all home-based handloom weavers. They prospered highly and offered full-time employment for the growing population. People stayed with the one employer for 40 years and retired with a gold watch as a reward in lieu of a pension.

?? URBANIZED FACTORIES and OFFICES

??? As the population grew, so did urbanization. Workers either moved to the towns and cities or commuted to work for a 9-5 workday. This was the true beginning of centralized work, which today is coming to an end, as I shall explain.

??? #Factories of all kinds had production lines that required a full team of employees to work alongside them. Later they became highly automated and also got robots, as we saw in the automotive industry. But until then, it was all mechanical work.

??? I have always said that #office #buildings were “paper-shuffling factories in the sky” because I see them as needless centralization, with people sitting in rows of desks, shuffling paper back and forth. For sure, once work-processers and bookkeeping machines and then computer software came along, that work could have been completed anywhere – as it can today.

??? In this era, whether in factories or offices, people worked a life-long career, initially without changing jobs, until they retired at age 65 with a pension. And people sought what we call Work-Life Balance.

??? In terms of my own experience in this era. I went out of high-school into a banking career, and soon moved to a Head Office job in a multi-story building where we were starting to get computers. But then I quit and emigrated to #Canada into an almost identical job in #Toronto.

??? My career progressed and I learned much about strategic planning and business management at a senior level. It was in this role that I became a Futurist and eventually quit to become an independent consultant.

??? One reason I did so was because Work-Life balance was not satisfying. I wanted #Life-#Work #Integration, where Life again comes first, as it did on the family farm. I have been very successful at that and long-ago gave up having a consulting office to fully work remotely.

?? QAIMETA “GLOCAL” VILLAGE

??? In other words, I transformed my life to be in sync with the digital era, where you do not physically need to “go” to work. Everything gets reversed. Work comes to you, anyplace, anytime, anywhere in the “Glocal” (Global?+Local) Village society.

??? More and more of us are going to work this way, not just with AI apps but using what I call Quantum “Advanced” Intelligence (#QAI), often with Digital Twins, and working both virtually and remotely as needed.

??? However, once the #Metaverse arrives in full maturity, thanks to QAI, fewer and fewer people will actually do any “work” as such. Rather we will live in a #Family-#Leisure-#Society where we collaborate with #humanoids and #robots of various kinds, with them doing most of the work. So yes, they will take over our jobs, but they will generate enough wealth to enable us to live an integrated and leisurely life in the Metaverse.

??? I will describe the “Metaverse Future of Work and Life” in more specific detail in the next article.

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??? NO REGRETS: In case you are wondering, no I do not regret any of my past life. I totally appreciate it 100% and am so glad that I experienced all this. It allows me to understand first-hand how the world and life changes. :-)